Since the libraries were frozen with the first beta, KDE developers have been adding features and functionality to their applications. Now it is time to start polishing these features; writing and translating documentation, improving the usability, and completing the artwork. As KDE 4.0 is feature-frozen now and going full on into bugfixing mode, major ideas and changes will be held off until KDE 4.1. However, some KDE components, such as Plasma, are exempt from this freeze and will still see significant
improvements.

The info page has more information, including information on how to obtain KDE 4.0 Beta 2.

Comments

Those writing the code, obviously. And those who added stuff at http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.0_Announcements
And Wade, Steve, Joseph, Danny and the others for the review. Sebas for fixing what I did wrong, and telling me how to do better in the future... What, I should ignore all the cool stuff going on but not in the beta?!?! ;-)

And I want to mention to everybody that:
Danny, Riddel, Sebas and others are doing an amazing job on getting articles on the dot. If you see how the software works, you'd be surprised that anything ever gets online ;-)

And they could use some help. If you have time (no really skills needed, just some time and willingness) you can make a difference here.

Same with some other administrative stuff, we can use some help there as well.

And you want to write articles? magazines often ask us for ppl who want to write (it can even make you money), join kde-promo@kde.org and offer help to those asking for it ;-)

Wait...is that officially a back-handed compliment, a compliment and an insult, or two compliments?

Irregardlessably, as I've stated in a recent blog entry, Jos did a great job of creating a thoughtful and detailed press release that puts other larger companies to shame.

Side note: We have screenshots and plenty of links; just remember that if you see a press release or story like this pointing to images or URLs on your server, don't be devious and replace the image with an elephant's butt or a goatse image.

Links and images are only useful if they stay up for some amount of time. If you don't want press releases or stories pointing to your images and therefore servers, please let us know. We may not have the Slashdot effect but we have the Dot effect.

What's the quality intended to be for this release? Is it meant to be functional? The last beta, people complained that it was incomplete and non-functional, and they were told to stop whinging and that it wasn't *meant* to be complete or functional.

I'm quite happy to test this if it's actually beta quality, but I don't want to waste my time on something that isn't even supposed to work right yet. I am happy tracking down bugs, but want something that is actually operational. "Time to start polishing" and "significant improvements" could mean absolutely anything in this regard.

The quality is actually quite good: most applications don't crash anymore if you start them and the games and kde-edu are both really good.
To be honest, most applications seem quite good already: dolphin p.e. (though I might have to get used to it :)

One problem I have encountered is the "accelerated" bling: performance goes immediately down and I can almost put my finger on the screen to follow the mouse-pointer with my finger.

And I think it's really a pity that they (we?) didn't get raptor out of the door, so that console-challenged users still can get along without kicker: At the moment, there's simply no menu if you kill kicker.

Oh and for the whole fun of it, run
nepomukdaemon
with Alt+F2 (or konsole) - then you'll have the beginning of the meta-information goodness of dolphin.

Starting strigidaemon (the same way) starts the indexer, (first time is slow!) which then enables you to search through stuff it has indexed (normally $HOME) using Alt+F2, too.

All in all I think it's a felicitous tech-preview of what can be expected in the next few months.

Stop! Did I say _tech_ preview? Oxygen is almost complete: although the window decorations are nowhere close to what they might become next week, the icon set seem to be almost finished - at least in dolphin and most other obvious places (don't start systemsettings or the window-effects-dialog if you're afraid of questionmark-icons :)

Get it, try it (no: don't use it fulltime, yet) and get busy making it better:
- Documentation is needed - see #kde-docs (nixternal has the list?)
- Translations have already started - get on board while some of the easy strings are still to be got!
- Bug the developers with bug reports - if you don't tell it, it (probably) won't be fixed!
- Show it to your friends - if they laugh, tell them off and explain the difference between an open and a closed development-cycle!

Applications from kdebase, kdegames, kdeedu, kdegraphics, kdesdk are, on the whole, functional and stable enough to be worth testing. The window manager works, I haven't used it extensively.

The desktop itself (including the panel) is still way behind where it needs to be. The widget style and window decoration still need work, you will probably find it easier to use one of the ported KDE 3 styles for the time being.

it's a joke we came up with in a kartoffelhaus one night over dinner and brainstorming about names for betas. it was suggested that kartoffel was an great name, and the follow up suggestion was to misspell it with a 'c' as a self-referential jab at our historical k-ification.

this is what happens when you get a bunch of geeks together thinking of code names for stuff. ;)

May I propose that the last KDE 4 RC be codenamed "Karl" in honor of
the father of both Germany and France.
If you look at the map of contributions to KDE 4 you will agree that it is appropriate.
You can make a joke about it and use the old English version "Churl".
("Charon" is not appropriate)

It's quite common in all languages derevied from Latin (+ English, which is just a Nethergerman/Norse mix with fancy words, ironically imported from the always behated French) that c before a, o, u and other consonant is pronounced k, while c before e i and y is pronounced as a what you call "soft" (s/sh-like or guttural). I'd be happy to know about words of latin languages that break this rule, I cant think of any myself.

You always see this rotated green/grass image on the plasma desktop. I wonder what it is good for. And even more interesting: Can you do that to any plasmoid? That would be really great if I could freely rotate things...

When you say "objects" you mean plasmoids or any kind of object that lies on the desktop. The idea of this rotated/resized image would be great for open windows if they could be rotated on the z axis. Then you have a practical way to leave open windows on the desktop that don't take much space but you can still see what each one of them is.

Aaron's talking about Plasmoids - rotating windows is not within the area of competence of the Plasma application. That said, kwin could rotate windows on any axis you want right now, it just wouldn't be particularly useful, as X does not yet have generic support for input transformations, i.e. translating input events into a transformed (rotated) windows' reference frame. Work on this is ongoing in the X.org project, and will eventually land on your desktop. And KDE 4 will have the technological infrastructure to make use of it.

Right now, you can look at Mandriva's "Metisse" environment for a case-specific implementation of an OpenGL-based composited desktop with support for input transformations to get a feel for what it enables.

All those styles are KDE4 ones... and I dont see why a couple of them cant be included as "lightweight" alternatives to oxygen. I especially like "float". Its nice a polished, and would be a great addition to the default list.

This article's "The _info page_ has more information" links to http://www.kde.org/info/3.93.php. It took me a while to realize that a 3.9x release is in fact a 4.0 beta, I think this will confuse other n00bs. Could the 3.93 info page say in big letters that it's effectively 4.0 beta 2, and maybe explain the numbering scheme?

Also, the Download section of the left-hand navigation on info pages like http://www.kde.org/info/ only has a link for "KDE 4.0 Beta1", maybe replace that with "KDE 40 Beta 2".

Some mix up with the kdebase split and Plasma and Kicker (not yet completely) being removed happened in Beta 2: some parts of Plasma like the tasks data engine, which is used by the taskbar plasmoid, still depend on Kicker parts (actually Kicker is still started behind Plasma). When you build from SVN kicker gets build but due to a bug it doesn't anymore in the official Beta 2 kdebase-workspace release tarball from which the current openSUSE packages were built. Next week these problems will be fixed in the openSUSE packages.

hi, i got a mandriva spring (2007.1). i have updated kde from the kde mirror from beta 1 to beta 2, but when i start the session i receive this message and i can't access the desktop. what can i do?
thanks
Marcello

I´ve installed KDE4 Beta1 using meta packages from Yast (Suse), and i used the kde4 like a charm. But when i updated to KDE4 Beta 2 i prompted for this error too, when using the same user from beta 1 session. I created a new user too. Did you found any trick for workaround or fix this? thanks in advance.